NASA Funded Experiment Selects Coraid

Coraid Inc. announced that The EBEX Balloon-Borne experiment,
which is funded by NASA, selected Coraid’s platform to protect
sensitive data collected during high altitude flights over Antarctica.  

Coraid’s CorOS is able to perform under extreme weather conditions,
reliable enough that it can secure data on computers during test flights
and simple enough that the scientists can manage the storage
themselves. The EBEX experiment aims to collect several terabytes of
data over a two week period as it studies information on cosmic
microwaves that originate from the Big Bang. The goal is to gather more
detailed information about the beginning of the universe.   
 
The EBEX experiment, which weighs three tons, is lifted aloft by a giant
helium balloon 100 meters in diameter and will travel 120,000 feet into
the air over Antarctica in December 2011. The project is intended to
collect massive amounts of data relating to minute differences in
microwaves arriving from space to the Earth’s uppermost atmosphere.
These microwaves represent the universe a split second after the Big
Bang and give scientists a unique look into the beginning of the
universe.
 
A high level of redundancy is required for this project. The researchers
needed a flexible, distributed storage solution for this experiment and
did not want the data disks directly attached to a single computer.
Rather they preferred an Ethernet-based solution so the data was
centralized. For this reason, the experiment implements two redundant
computers on board the balloon that share information and several
terabytes of data is protected by Coraid’s storage solution. Coraid’s
platform allows multiple computers to use the same disk. Both computers
are also able to choose which disk to use at any specific moment based
on different conditions.
 
The team of scientists completed a 15-hour test flight over the Arizona
dessert in mid 2009 and the instrumentation, computers and storage were
unscathed during the test flight.

"The key in an experiment like this is redundancy, resiliency and reliability," stated Professor Shaul Hanany of the University of Minnesota, principal investigator of EBEX. "The
conditions faced during this experiment are hard on the equipment.
Coraid’s platform provides us with a reliable solution without
sacrificing performance. In addition, the simple management of Coraid’s
solution ensures there is no interruption in gathering and protecting
our data," said Dr. Lorne Levinson, research scientist at Weizmann
Institute of Science in Israel, who was in charge of designing the data
storage system.
 
"This environment is as extreme as it gets," said Carl Wright, executive vice president of sales and product management at Coraid. "Hovering
more than one hundred thousand feet above the South Pole is certainly
not typical, but the need for reliable storage is universal. We’re
excited to be part of history being made and will continue to support
NASA and its important research."